Class Photos

Last Update: 11/19/2008

What I did after High School Graduation
by: Bill Cavanaugh

I'm Bill Cavanaugh. After High School, I joined the US Navy after realizing military service was inevitable. I ended up in NAS Brunswick, Maine. Here I went to flight and ground school where I learned to play double pinochle and became a member of the Society of Old Crows. After a couple years in Maine and narrowly missing Vietnam thanks to a snow storm and Nixon calling for no further escalation, I ended up doing my tour in Iceland... a place, considering, I will never complain about.

After doing 3 years, 9 months, 2 hours and 22 minutes in the military, I came back to Connecticut and enrolled in Waterbury State Technical College – Hoowah! Here I learned how to continue to play poor basketball and how to trick the state into funding a "ski club" which was mostly a bunch of us heading up to resorts a couple times a month.  Somehow, in all of this though, I graduated (it's own feat) and was hired by IBM which was basically a civilian military organization. I stayed with IBM for 30 years.

I married and after living in Washington D.C. for a few years, I settled down in Essex Junction, Vermont.  I had two kids: Meagan, who is actually editing this because she can't help herself (and won't let her Dad do the Dad thing too much in his description of her) and Mike, who is pretty much the greatest guy alive.  Throughout my years in Vermont, Jack, Hammer, and Chip and their families would come up for July 4th weekend – and our kids would hear stories from high school, although what those stories were ultimately depended on who was telling them and who they were about. These stories though, became what my daughter wrote about in her papers for college and what my son has said those weekends were always the best in the year.

Now though – I live in Port Saint Lucie, Florida. Yes, the Sun Belt.  After retiring from IBM with a few patents and too much insight into what made the Elephant dance and going through a divorce, I moved down to the Sunshine state with a drink in my hand. I live down the street from my brother-in-law, aka best friend from college (who ended up marrying my sister, so that worked out). We have taken up deep sea fishing along the Atlantic Coast with the idea of eventually fishing the Bahamas. We started by switching to Rum and Cokes with Lime. It's going well. 

Okay, kid joke: A fish is swimming along and wham he smacks into something. He backs up a few feet looks and says "Dam."

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